


Coyote (1985)

by GRAYXOF



Series: 『 WETWORK 』 [2]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Choking, F/M, Parasites, Peace and quiet, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 20:38:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8682577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GRAYXOF/pseuds/GRAYXOF
Summary: "What did you do to my eyes?"





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SandwichMaker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandwichMaker/gifts).



> SUPPLY DROP #154: _Kaz has parasites._
> 
> This can stand alone but for greater context, I recommend checking out [Ricochet](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7962934) first.

In the Seychelles the winter sun burns hot, bleeds through the incessant rain and fog like a light leak in a roll of film. The air is heavy with humidity and the bite of stale sweat, rust, and firearm lubricant– this weather is hell for guns and the Diamond Dogs carrying them– and every surface is slick and scintillating, treacherous, warm to touch.

Quiet can’t get enough of it. She’s on her back in the center of her cell, soaked to the bone, eyes closed, tapping a tattoo into the deck in time to the radio. It’s been seven months since she came back from Lamar Khaate. Half a year since anyone’s bothered to lock her in. Five weeks since she’s last seen the red LED from the security camera blinking in the corner of her eye, an empty gesture when all of Mother Base is wired for audio surveillance but she appreciates it all the same. The guard posted at the top of the stairwell is–

“Dismissed.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me, soldier.”

It’s difficult to identify the voice past the rain and the drone of Ultravox but there’s only one officer on Mother Base who uses a crutch and Quiet would recognize the sound of _that_ anywhere, steels herself for a headache as soon as she catches the uneven stab of rubber on tarmac. Today is supposed to be her day off, a round of R&R after an eighteen-day stint with Venom Snake in Kabul. Solo ops have been ruled out for her and V’s been preoccupied with staff and arsenal assignments for the new FOB-Okhotsk since they got back– an undertaking that has nothing to do with her and everything to do with Commander Miller, so she can’t imagine what the fuck the XO is doing here when he should be chained to his desk.

Almost all of their previous interactions have been one-sided and they've fallen anywhere on the spectrum from vitriolic to a certain level of diplomatic, borderline civil on a good day _._ Forced understanding through a mutual working relationship with their _Boss_. Miller may have been chewed up and spat back out by his own war machine but he takes great pride in his work, and that pride keeps him professional. For the most part.

Quiet wonders, vaguely, if he wants her transferred to Okhotsk. 

She reluctantly opens one eye and he’s standing over her, jaw set, aviators flashing in the sun as he stares her down. His knuckles are white over his crutch where they’re not split and bleeding and he’s stripped to a filthy t-shirt beneath his trenchcoat. Bruises ring his neck like a collar. It’s a mark she’s seen on soldiers along the Angola-Zaire border, in Kabul, in KPK, but never here, never at _home_. Venom Snake is careful about who he chokes out with his bionic hand, treats it like the lethal weapon it is. Usually.

Dull panic– and it's concern for V, not his capricious, snarly second-in-command, to be clear– is what finally gets Quiet on her feet in a farce of military decorum. Standing, she’s as tall as Miller is, even barefoot. He flinches behind his shades as she cracks her back and yawns, baring teeth so clean they’re nearly translucent. The parasites do a hell of a job with her personal hygiene, but the same can’t be said for him– his own symbiotic colony lives only in his eyes and cheap cologne doesn’t do him any favors, either. Quiet deliberately takes her time adjusting her top, snaps a twisted strap into place. She’s learned that Miller responds to physicality in a way that Ocelot and V don’t and it’s useful, to keep him on edge, to direct his focus away from the chip in his shoulder.

And, yes, _there_ it is– Miller’s breath hitches, though he’s careful to turn it into a strangled approximation of a cough. When she pulls the aviators from his face his gaze flicks to the scarring on her ribs, then her mouth, then an indeterminate point past her shoulder. Black has blistered around his eyes, sifts in and out through his sun-damaged skin like ink on vellum.

Oh.

The silence wells up between them and it’s static, searing cold. Quiet breaks it first, humming high in her throat. A question.

“How the fuck d’you–“ Miller turns away entirely, starts over. “How do you _control_ your–? I’m sick of seeing through a fucking _kaleidoscope_.”

Of course his parasites are blinding him. Miller is wracked with post-traumatic stress and self-loathing, rarely ventures outside, sleeps less, and subsists on a diet of oxycontin and caffeine as far as she can tell, a winning combo that’s clearly bad for _the_ _one that covers_ – not that she’d give a shit if it didn’t drive him to her like this. As it is, she feels an uncomfortable ache of solidarity in whatever’s left of her gut. With Code Talker gone, they’re the only ones who can even _begin_ to–

Well, that’s fine. She, the resident expert on parasite bullshit, knows how to fix this. 

Quiet folds the sunglasses into her own top and takes the lapels of his coat in both hands, begins working it off his shoulders. Miller hisses sharply through his teeth and trips back, forcing her to shove him into the bars of the cell to keep them both upright. The crutch clatters to the floor.

“Bitch.” There’s a nasty curl of a grin somewhere in the word, so she ignores it, peels off the coat and lets it collapse around their feet. Miller actually growls when she pushes his shirt up but he leans into the scrape of her palm against the scar tissue knotted over where his arm used to be. Once it’s off she drags him forward, grips him until he gets his balance only to immediately buck away from her again. Her nails cut into him deep enough to draw blood and at least two of her toes break under the sole of his boot but she doesn’t let go and they hit the ground so hard it knocks the wind out of him. It’s no contest after that– Quiet rolls over, pins him easily as the sky opens up and rain hammers into their skin.

“What the hell?” His voice is level but his chest is heaving and he shivers when she places a hand on his neck. The bruises fit neatly under her fingers.  She hums again, softly now.

“S… so what? You don’t know the first thing about him and m–“ Miller swallows. Cuts himself off. Sighs. “I just need this _shit_ to go away.”

He’s talking about the parasite bloom but his blood is throbbing staccato with arousal and he’s hard under her so she sneers, grinds her hips just to fuck with him because she should’ve _known_ he gets off like this. Before the tape from The Man Who Sold The World _,_ V was constantly torn up by Miller's hands, his mouth, his heart: run down by a manifest of conflicting expectations, hollow. By the time she’d come back from the desert, the marks were long gone but his insides had been carved out entirely: _Big Boss_ may be a mangled chimera of two Snakes and a legend but Miller only ever had eyes for the man.

That’s always been Miller’s problem, really. He’s human.

Quiet isn’t but at her core she understands the language, can still remember the pull of _want,_ so she carefully releases his arm. He flexes the feeling back into it, stays down looking up at her, blinks glassily against the light and the rain. She cups his face in her hands, hooks her thumbs in his mouth, pries it open. He doesn’t bite.

“Hey… you– you’ve got… a hell of a backbone, parasite. Why don’t you go all the way?”

She slips her fingers between his teeth, reaches in until he gags. Anything to shut him up. Quiet leans in, holds him like a vice and hums along as new song crossfades in on the radio, low and insistent, until his human heart falls in time with her.

 

_–at the center, the center of the world–_

 

She breaks time into measures rather than minutes and that makes it easy, to stay with him. Miller locks his fingers around her thigh but he’s too keyed up to do anything but slide his hand around, to get it under the skin-tight mesh of her shorts for a better grip on her ass. She rides it out, lets him jerk against her until his mouth is soft and swollen in her hands and he’s overheated, shaking, hot under her.

 _Your pain is no credential here._ She mouths the lyrics silently, right in his face, presses her flesh to the ridges his teeth, cranes her neck so he can see the scar there. Salt from his sweat burns her fingers, streaks her blood across his face as the black stain sinks behind his eyes. Miller inhales. Meets her stare dead on.

“Fuck me, then.”

Fuck _him_ for putting it out there like that. Quiet considers him, shifts her weight so she’s _right_ where his cock’s leaking into his fatigues. He breathes through a moan, flushed so dark the bruises on his throat are almost invisible and she can tell it’s a little performative but that’s fine, he’s a mess and she– ah, she’s just as bad. No surprises there. The radio crackles, tunes in to a kreol weather forecast for Victoria and she sits up, runs her hands over him, digs in to the gaps between his ribs like she’s going to tear him apart.

It feels more as if she’s all that’s holding him together. That’s what finally stops her before she gets his belt off, keeps her fingers on the cool metal of the buckle until the surging of the parasites below her skin slows to a steady pulse. The storm has passed and steam is rising from the deck around them, blurs everything together in a stifling haze of gunmetal and gold.

_Fuck._

“Quiet–“ She hasn’t moved a muscle but he shudders anyway, reaches for his sunglasses. One of the lenses is cracked, the other punched out entirely.“Get off.”

Not like she needs to be told twice. Quiet rolls back on her heels, leaves her commanding officer to pull himself together.

She turns the shower on full blast and it feels really _clean,_ eats through the grease of Miller’s sweat on her skin like acid. She strips off her clothes, unties her hair, lets the rush of icy, recycled water drown out the radio static, lets it cool her down.

The weight of Miller’s hand on her shoulder nearly pulls her out of her skin. Quiet chokes on a wordless snarl and rounds on him, drives an elbow into his sternum only to catch him before he can properly fall. He doesn’t fight her this time, stays balanced as her coughing turns into a shadow of a laugh.

“You’re a fucking freak,” he says. As if they both don’t know it. He’s naked apart from his prosthetic leg and somehow that makes it less strange, more like a locker room, like they’re first-year recruits messing around in the communal showers again, brash and naive, _whole–_ and when his mouth twists into half a smile she can _see_ it, the man he was when Big Boss found him. Charisma and gunpowder in the cast iron hands of a legend.

Handsome, really. If they weren't both so catastrophically screwed up– yeah, okay, fine, she'd probably fuck him. Once.

Miller snorts derisively, leans back against the bars and crosses his arm over his chest. He bears the weight of her stare effortlessly, practically glows under it. Stupid bastard. “…maybe that makes two of us, huh.”

Quiet laughs, for real this time, wipes the blood that pools in her mouth on her palm. The wound in her trachea is one that won’t heal.

“What did you do to my eyes?”

She’s starting to like that he forgets she can’t answer, that he refuses to understand her voice was cut out of her the same way his arm and leg were sawed off in Afghanistan. It’s–

No, _that’s not right._ Quiet puts her hand over his throat again, leaves a smear of brilliant red where the bruises are fading now that he’s been in the sun. His breathing is deep, pulse even under her fingers.

He talks to her because he knows _exactly_ what she’s lost. Like he said– two of a kind.

 

 

**°**

 

OBTAINED TAPE: [AVALANCHE]

 


End file.
